Beezy’s shoe collection: ‘When I put my wardrobe together I think like a painter. Bright colours attract me, and those that contradict each other work well together.’
Beezy’s shoe collection: ‘When I put my wardrobe together I think like a painter. Bright colours attract me, and those that contradict each other work well together.’
Outrageous and irreverent, by turns a painter, performance artist and sculptor, Beezy Bailey moved to Cape Town from Johannesburg to set up studio, having gained the confidence to become an artist after meeting Andy Warhol.
‘When I talked about moving to Cape Town from Johannesburg, my father suggested I come and live in this house, built my aunt in the 1950s. I was quite nomadic at the time, moving between London, Johannesburg and Cape Town, but when I made the decision to move here, he very sweetly said an artist needs to put roots down, and what better place to put roots down than in paradise.’
Beezy Bailey’s home in Higgovale, Cape Town, is a long and handsome Italianate villa surrounded by a two-acre garden – a luxury unheard of in most cities. Straddling a terrace on a contour of a foothill linking Table Mountain through the City Bowl to the sea, the property has attention-grabbing views of both the town and the great granite mountain. A forecourt at the entrance is strewn with cars, dogs and statues, while undergrowth, alternately wild and untamed and neat and orderly, greets your arrival. Somewhere in a hollow below the house, beyond the acanthus and the agapanthus, is Beezy’s studio.
The house is filled with venerable family antique furniture: oil paintings that escaped Sir Abe Bailey’s bequest to the SA National Gallery down the road, and Beezy’s own paintings; the one on the stairs a unique collaboration between himself and his alter ego, Joyce Ntobe. He uses the drawing room as the best vantage point for bigger canvases when a sale is in the offing because it’s so enormous. Its Pompeian red walls, gilded cornice and blue ceiling studded with gold stars, ‘inspired by Giotto’s ceilings in Assisi’, indicate more than a passing interest in the use of colour. Sir Abe’s cock-fighting chairs flank the fireplace. Chinese carpets, Coromandel screens, and sofas and curtains upholstered in a block-printed fabric of his own design complete the scene. The look is Indo-Italian. Next door, the dining room is blue, its Indian dining chairs silver.
Beyond, a vast kitchen is filled with teams of teenagers and armchairs and there are more dogs. Upstairs, a bathroom’s barrel-vaulted ceiling is studded with perlemoen shells, its floor black-and-white check, the walls indigo. Exotic and whimsical, it could be the fantasy of a 17th-century Roman cardinal. It could be one of Beezy’s paintings, too.
Starting out, Beezy had the opportunity to work at Drum magazine, or become an artist. ‘My maverick father suggested the latter but I only agreed after meeting Warhol in New York.’ Working from his garden studio, today he’s renowned for his painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpting, and performance art, as well as collaborations with musicians like David Bowie and artists like Zwelethu Mthethwa. A maverick if ever there was one.
‘What Beezy does best,’ said Melvyn Minnaar writing in the Cape Times, ‘is pick up his paint brush and tell an individual story in his freewheeling way, inventing magic and mystery as he goes along.’ His sense of colour is delightful, his painterly style energetic and his imagination, given free reign, vivid and dramatic. Expressionistic, surreal or conceptual; how does he choose his imagery? ‘Like Picasso, I say that it is not for me to explain the contents of my work; that’s for the viewer to do. I am a conduit of visual images greater than me, at best a messenger from God, at worst a Fallen Angel.’
Exhibitionist or performance artist? ‘I’ve always been a performer.’ His critics used to accuse him of clowning around. This was the sensation-seeker who once appeared dressed in a thin layer of gold spray paint blowing flames from his mouth; the artist who received death threats when he draped the statue of Boer general Louis Botha, outside Parliament, in traditional Xhosa garb as an initiate to ‘shake the old order’. As a performer, it was inevitable he’d collaborate with other artists – famously ‘visually jamming’ with rock star David Bowie, indie-rock giant Dave Matthews and Brian Eno, all of whom started out in art school. ‘I always wanted to be a rock star and they always wanted to be artists.’
The entrance hall houses a collection of Bailey’s own work and is the hub of a busy household of teenagers, art dealers and collectors, and friends.
Villa Toscana was built by Beezy’s aunt in the 1950s. He moved into the house about 20 years ago, when he returned to South Africa from a sojourn in London.
The bathroom is both exotic and whimsical. Part dressing room, part boudoir, flashes of silvery light emanate from its ceiling when sunbeams alight on the serried ranks of perlemoen shells embedded in it.
The interiors of Villa Toscana, with their collections of old masters and period furniture, show off Beezy’s often startling and contrary colour predelictions.
A richly textured drawing room is part repository for furniture inherited from his pioneering mining magnate grandfather, and part gallery for his own works.
Bailey became an artist after meeting Andy Warhol in New York. ‘Actually my maverick father suggested I become an artist, but I only did so because of the confidence Warhol gave me.’
The Bailey house looks down over the city and up towards the mountain. ‘It’s one of the most beautiful views in the world.’
Bailey works from a studio at the bottom of the garden, making paintings. ‘I’m a kind of expressionistic, surreal, conceptual and performance artist all rolled into one.’
In the dining room, silver-gilded Indian chairs surround the dining table. ‘I don’t really like going out for dinner often. I prefer large lunches at home and to get drunk at lunch. And then I can enjoy my drunkenness and digest the food.’
Home cooked: preferring to cook in his own kitchen, Beezy’s style of cuisine is never about what the finished dish looks like. Instead it’s all about the process, the zest and verve for combining ingredients, and the enjoyment of taste.